1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to optical networks and, more particularly, to methods and apparatus for the maintenance and analysis of an optical network.
2. Description of Related Art
Due to increased data traffic over public and private networks, fuelled in part by the rapid acceptance and reliance on the public Internet and the world wide web, the deployment of optical networks or optical network links has increased substantially. Further, due to the large bandwidth that is provided by these networks, any circumstance which detrimentally affects network performance will, in most instances, affect a tremendous amount of data. Additionally, due to the increased use of networking and data communication in general, users have developed an increased reliance on network availability. Moreover, users of data networks, including users of optical networks, have increasingly become less tolerant of any performance degradation or network down time.
With the increased deployment and use of optical networks comes an increased need for maintenance of these networks. The types of maintenance may include, for example, the need to assess a network's performance, troubleshooting, etc.
In many optical networks, maintenance and network performance assessment is performed manually. While a list of the network components or elements forming an optical network are typically known, the performance and configuration of each network element, which may change over time, is generally difficult to obtain. Current techniques to determine optical network performance and configuration require a high degree of understanding of the network's operations and methodology. Additionally, as a result of manual steps required to gather, format and validate statistics collected for an optical network, there is a tremendous opportunity for errors to result. Moreover, manually performing these operations is extremely time consuming. It is estimated that analyzing an optical network comprising a forty (40) element ring may require approximately forty hours of time. As a result, this manual procedure of network analysis and maintenance is often unacceptable for a variety of reasons: the cost in time and money is too high, customers or users of the network usually require a quicker response and the quality of the analysis is often suspect due to the likelihood of errors caused by manually performing the analysis.
Additionally, due to difficulties in locating and employing qualified personnel to perform such maintenance and analysis, required or desired maintenance is often delayed or not performed. Moreover, without robust and accurate analysis, it is extremely difficult to “tune” or optimize an optical network for a customer.
Use of specially designed monitoring software which could be installed at each network element has been considered. However, use of such software may detrimentally impact the operation of the element itself. Moreover, the installation and maintenance of such monitoring software at each element in a network may result in additional maintenance and cost requirements.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide an optical network maintenance tool which addresses at least some of these shortcomings.